Just last week, I talked to a friend who had his cell phone repaired by a local cell provider. Unfortunately, during the repair, they erased his phone...and he didn't have a backup. He lost over 1200 very important contacts.
You regularly back up your computers and servers (or at least you should), but do you do the same with your smartphone? Given the huge amount of contact information, photos, videos and other data we all carry around on smartphones, it’s critical to back them up or risk losing all that data forever. There are two basic ways to back up your phone: automatically to the cloud or manually to your computer. We believe that you should do both.
To The Cloud. Cloud backups are secured with your password-protected account. They can easily be configured to run automatically so you can “set it and forget it.” Apple users can use iCloud to back up photos, contacts, calendars and other data (5 GB of storage is free). Turn on and configure iCloud Backup by going to Settings > iCloud. Android users can back up to Google servers in much the same way, using a Google account. Configure your preferences by going to Settings > Backup.
To Your Computer. Both Apple and Android users also can back up data directly to a computer manually. Generally, connecting the phone to the computer by cable is the quickest way to do this. Apple users can also use iTunes Wi-Fi Sync to wirelessly back up phone data to a computer. Remember, though, when backing up your smartphone to a computer, your data is only as safe as that computer. Be sure to back up the computer regularly as well (and make sure your computer is password protected).
If you're using corporate email (like Microsoft Exchange), you contacts, calendar, and email are safe AS LONG AS the Exchange account is your default (and you're saving new contacts to Exchange). To be safe, we always recommend a local AND a cloud backup.
